Guy Doesnt Know What His Test Is On, Doesnt Matter

James Spalding, a junior psychology major, doesn’t know what his test on Monday is going to cover, but isn’t worried about his performance. He is confident that his test taking methods will see him through.

“I know there’s a vocab section, and there’s bound to be some multiple choice,”¯ Spalding speculated Thursday evening. “Provided the professor doesn’t pull any ‘which one of the following is NOT...’ I can slap them with a bit of intuition and contextual analysis and come out alright.”¯

Over the weekend, Spalding locked himself in his room and watched back-to-back marathons of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman and How It’s Made.

“True/False usually trips me up,”¯ admitted Spalding during a commercial break and shoving a handful of sour cream and onion potato chips into his waiting mouth. “But those rarely go beyond a dozen questions, so I can guess my way through and take a hit in the grade if I have to.”¯

Coming out of his room Sunday evening, Spalding wiped his mouth on his sleeve, snorted, and said, “Well, that’s that.”¯

Speaking to reporters early Monday morning, Spalding showed them three pages of calculations he had stayed up all Sunday night making. He is confident that as long as he can BS his way to a B minus, he’ll still be able to get credit for the class and graduate on time.

“It all comes down to the essay portion,”¯ puffed Spalding on his sprint to the exam. “I’ve found that for handwritten essays in a Blue Book, the sweet spot is about 400 to 450 words with some buzzwords from earlier in the test thrown in. Saying ‘It could be argued’ instead of ‘I think’ really boosts the perceived confidence and complexity of the essay, and you still get to write in first person.”¯

“Take-home typed essays are a different story though,”¯ Spalding continued to wheeze. “For those you need at least 700 words, you can’t mess with the margins, and so help you if you try Wikipedia. They smell that a mile away. What you need to do is minimally paraphrase the Encyclopedia Britannica 2003. Professors forgot those things exist.”¯

Spalding insisted that for any and all written essays, flow is the most important part of your writing. With a good flow of ideas, what would have been a C minus easily becomes a C plus, possibly even breaking into the low B territory.

He also urges people to check his Youtube channel where he posts weekly videos with tips on how to make the best of a bad academic situation.

“I have a lot of subscribers actually,”¯ said Spalding, showing reporters the 15 notebooks of collegiate observations that make up the majority of the material for his videos. “I’m really surprised. And the video I made about the perfect ratio of skipping versus going to class has more than four million views. That one went viral and I was really proud of it. It took me three semesters of trial and error and emailing to work out exactly the median presence a student has to project to stay in a professor’s good graces.”¯

Spalding says he is really looking forward to graduating to the real world, where he hopes his efforts will lead him to discover just how many sick days he can take without being labeled a slacker.